make `%matplotlib widget` behave like `inline`?

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Assessment

Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Newbie friendliness
25/100
Issue type
Feature
Clarity
Needs clarification
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
jupyter, jupyter-notebook

Research direction

Start by reproducing the behavior in Jupyter Lab with %matplotlib widget, sequential plotting commands, and @interact, then compare it with the default inline backend. Determine whether the requested cell-scoped output and updating interaction can be supported; done means documenting a supported approach or clearly identifying the required behavior change.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

I have a notebook in Jupyter Lab, so far using the default matplotlib backend, which in this context I believe is inline. When I have a sequence of plotting commands (pyplot.plt etc.), they combine into a figure that is shown after the respective code cell. Also, @interact works as expected.

I now wanted to zoom in, which inline does not support, so I issued %matplotlib widget. The figures are now zoomable alright, but I don't have that neat behavior where plotting code in one cell contributed to the following figure output cell, and doesn't modify anything else. And @interact, instead of producing new (versions of) a figure, now puts everything on top of each other.

From reading around I realize that this is the intended behavior. The thing is, I don't like it. So my question is: Is there a way to make widget behave like inline?

If there is not, is there a guide that tells me how to modify my code so that plot commands affect only the next output cell, and @interact updates instead of adds?

Dominant language
Jupyter Notebook
Stars
1.7k
Forks
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PR merge metrics
No merged PRs in 30d

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